SMA

Providing 24/7 managed music and video content services to over 3,000 business subscribers throughout Australia

The Client

Satellite Music Australia (SMA) has been supplying the Australian and New Zealand retail, hospitality and commercial businesses with audio, vision and marketing solutions since 1996. A member of the Fairfax Media family, SMA has the largest digital music database in the Southern Hemisphere and maintains music label agreements with APRA, AMCOS and the PPCA.

The Challenge

SMA needed to migrate its existing service to a new platform and at the same time add significant new end user functionality. The new service would also need to be 100% compatible with the field installed player devices. The service would deliver 21 channel categories of managed content drawn form over a quarter of a million audio and video files. Channel categories and content are managed by SMA who develop genres, create and rotate playlists on a regular basis. Services can also include advertising content to enhance capabilities of the service which can be provided by each client and sequenced within playlists at regular intervals.

In addition, SMA wanted to provide end users with the ability to create, edit and sequence their own playlists via a simple web based interface. The new web based service would also provide them with the ability to directly upload advertising content and sequence it within their own custom designed playlists.

Switch Media’s Role

Switch Media’s role was to provide a migration path for SMA in order to relaunch the service and to deliver the new front end user functionality. This included utilising Switch Media’s local design and development team to work closely with SMA in the specification and design of the new features. Switch Media’s cloud based video content management system, the Switch Media Manager, was chosen to manage the extensive pool of existing assets and also manage the ingest of new content.

Project Outcomes & ROI

The new service went live in May 2013. With 24/7 customer service and technical support SMA is now delivering a total digital music, video and marketing solution to over 3,000 account customers. In addition, the Switch Media Manager is providing support for the ongoing management of SMA’s database of music which is the largest digital music library in the Southern Hemisphere.

The new service includes the new end user customised functionality, and can also deliver advertisements and announcements in a controlled and targeted capacity. SMA continues to provide managed content services through its Music Master scheduling system as well as maintenance of the music licensing requirements and public performance fees.

Project Summary

Provide a complete service to support the delivery of up to 21 channels with access to over 250,000 media files

Delivering a workflow solution to support ingest, transcoding and storage and playlist creation for digital content